Re: Ann Druyan talks about science, religion...



John Savard ha escrito:
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> >> On Mon, 23 May 2005 03:07:38 GMT, Sam Wormley <swormley1@xxxxxxxxx>
> >> wrote:
>
> >> >Ann Druyan talks about science, religion...
> >> > http://www.csicop.org/si/2003-11/ann-druyan.html
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>
> I am not, myself, a believer in any form of revealed religion.

Which would theoretically make you into an agnostic - if it were not
for what you say further down below. And judging by that, it also seems
unlikely that you endorse some sort of New Wave patchwork spirituality.
So who knows.

> Nor am I
> opposed to the idea that what science has shown us about the Universe,
> its immensity and complexity, is a fit subject for awe and wonder.

I´m glad to hear that. But the question is to what extent you feel
like an alien and insignificant (for whom?) entity in this universe.
And in the case of that you don´t feel like such an alien and
insignificant entity, why that is so. Or, using expressions from the
article in question, if and how you have found your "place in the
fabric of nature", or how and to which extent you have overcome the
"Post-Copernican Stress Syndrome" (it was Copernicus, as validated
by Kepler and Galilei, who kicked us out of our -ptolemaic- cosmic
home). More on that below under the keyword "worship".

>
> But my main impression in reading the article by Ann Druyan was one of
> profound sadness.

Thank you for your profound compassion with her. You talk like a true
Christian.

>
> I was sad that she equated faith with credulity, and seemed to be of the
> belief that all Christians in the United States are Creationists.

According to Ann Druyan in this article -and I basically agree with her
on this- if you are a Christian but not a Creationist you most likely
have "built a wall inside of yourself" which "separates what you
know from what you feel". Because how would you reconcile that
all-pervading principle of evolution with a divine will? In the manner
of Teilhard de Chardin? The argument of evolution as God´s will can
easily be eliminated by Ockham´s Razor. The same applies to the Big
Bang as God´s will. Or in other words, a non-creationist Christian is
likely to end up with a rather incoherent world view.

Actually, further down you yourself admit that religion is providing
ethical values "almost always at the price of demanding credulity in
addition to faith". So what is this "almost" about? What´s the
difference between pure faith and credulity?

>
> I must admit that I wasn't too impressed with her politics either. If
> she thinks that George W. Bush has been fanning the flames of
> anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States after September 11, she is
> badly mistaken. He has, instead, been doing everything in his power to
> deflect and contain the natural human instinctive response to that
> terrorist attack - so that we might sleep soundly, kill _all_ the
> Muslims, and let Allah sort them out - by reminding Americans that Islam
> is a "great religion", by steadfastly avoiding seeking measures that
> discriminate against Arab-Americans or Muslim Americans... and by doing
> what seems to have confused her, refusing to infuriate the American
> people through a do-nothing response to that outrage.
>
> Her misreading of George W. Bush indicates the source of her other
> errors. She seems to assume that every American could be an educated
> liberal, not daring to think that some Americans might not be smart
> enough, or rich enough, to become one.
>
> If you aren't rich enough that your *own* survival can be taken for
> granted, instead of being "liberal", willing to take risks, or give
> substance away, to help those less fortunate than yourself, you will be
> cautious - and conservative. You will live in a less expensive
> neighborhood - so you will consider it a matter of urgent concern how
> well the police prevent crime from spreading. You will find changes in
> the job market a matter of grave importance - and, thus, you will likely
> be unresponsive to calls for increased immigration. Vito Marcantonio
> might vote his conscience, but most of us vote our pocketbooks.

Of course most of us vote our pocketbooks. Thus, if I think about the
history of the workers and leftist movements on this planet and then
read your theory about why less rich people tend to vote more
conservative, it seems to me as if you are trying to convince me that
rivers are flowing uphill. Rural folks tend to vote more conservative,
but that has to do with education rather than pocketbooks.

At any rate, none of this has to do either with Ann Driyan´s article
or with the topic of this forum. So I should really not discuss it
here.

>
> And anyone who accepts the so-called "Theory of Evolution" might note
> that the time since our ancestors, as it were, "came down from the
> trees", is but a cosmic eyeblink. Hence, rather than Man having giant
> untapped resources of genius, it may be more accurate to suspect that,
> on average, we became human and civilized after we developed just enough
> brainpower to barely manage the feat.

One aspect of biological evolution is that it does not strive for
perfect solutions. Any mutation that provides a certain advantage in
survival fitness -in combination with an appropriate dose of
reproductive luck- will do. Especially if it allows the invasion of a
new ecological niche. Historical opportunism is written all over the
face of biological structure. Thus, biological structure is inherently
imperfect (appendix, inverted retina etc.). I suspect that the
quotation marks which you put around the term "Theory of Evolution"
are just a manner of speaking, and that you do not belong to those
people who believe that Trilobites, Dinosaurs and Humans once lived
together on planet Earth.

On the background of this humble parsimony in evolution it is
especially amazing to see how far we have come since the Trilobites.
Looking at our evolutionary past since then, who can fathom the
ultimate potential of evolution on this planet? You?

I always tend to say that we human beings are just as ridiculous as we
are fascinating. And we are very fascinating.

>
> Thus, a kindly old Father in the Sky, Who is simpler to understand than
> abstruse philosophical dissertations on the nature of human
> consciousness, might well be more suited to the needs of cultures that
> must teach their members to respect the rights of other individuals.

When it comes to abstruseness, a certain book called the Bible might
well be a candidate for the world record. It talks about two entirely
different gods: The one of the Old Testament or the Thora, and the one
his supposed son is talking about in the New Testament (the kindly one
being the latter). So which god is the correct one? Has Jesus
misunderstood his "father", or has God gone scizophrenic? Don´t
tell me that this is simple to understand.

And on the other hand: what could be less abstruse and more simple than
the Cathegorical Imperative of Kant, which basically states that you
should "treat others in the same manner in which you want them to
treat you"? How much intelligence does a person need in order to
understand this ethical imperative? I don´t think much.

And when it comes to respect the rights of other individuals, I wonder
what it is that religion contributes to respecting at least the basic
rights of gays and lesbians.

So what then does the Bible really contribute to ethics? Let´s just
look at the Ten Commandments:
The first three are completely useless, exept maybe for instilling fear
in certain simple minds (if you don´t worship me I will crush not only
you but all of your children and grandchildren until the third and
fouth generation).
The fourth one isn´t exactly useless, but it is unfit to be a
commandment (don´t work on Sundays). In the U.S. it has practically
expired, and if it is still partially obeyed in Europe that is not due
to the Bible but due to the workers unions.
The fifth one is also useless, since it basically says something sort
of like that you should obey gravity (honor your parents - which can
mean different things to different people). The love between parents
and their offspring appears to be among the strongest instincts that
human beings still have (besides sexuality). But beyond that it also is
a very dubious commandment, which was next to impossible to obey for a
large part of the German postwar generation. Should you honor your
father if he has been killing jewish civilians or polish
"subhumans"? Or on a more contemporary note: Should you honor your
father if he is raping your little sister? Perhaps this commandment
would be more adequate if it said "love thy children", since child
abuse is much more frequent and also tends to be more vicious than
parent abuse.
So in the end, only the Commandments six to ten can be considered as
truly useful ethically (don´t kill humans, don´t commit adultery,
don´t steal, don´t lie, don´t envy).

As far as the political attitude of Jesus (New Testament) as a pacifist
and a defender of the poor and downtrodden is concerned, it does not
seem to have had any significant impact on the history of Christianity
(Crusades, Inquisition etc.). For example, compare Christianity to its
main contender Islam: Mohamed was much less of a pacifist than Jesus
Christ, nonetheless historically both religions have been demonstrating
itself as equally violent. If Jesus were living today as a U.S.
citizen, I very much doubt that he would have voted for W last
November. Instead, he would probably have compared him with the Roman
emperor.

In summary, the ethically useful content of the Bible really fits on a
single handwritten *** of toilet tissue (forget about Kleenex, too
big). Weigh this against against all the other mysogenist and otherwise
harmfull content of it. The true value of the Bible resides in its age
as a historical document and not in its usefulness as an ethical
guideline.

And now, compare all of this to the simplicity and elegance of the
Cathegorical Imperative. I have the impression that you believe it is
better to scare people than to convince them.

>
> Of course the religions of antiquity were largely designed to manipulate
> the peasantry, and serve the interests of chiefs and kings. But they
> have grown and developed over time.

Nevertheless, Pope Woytila has always been condemming the catholic
liberation theologists in Latin and South America.

> As the development of Christianity,
> including its origins in Judaism, illustrates this well, it is
> particularly inexcusable for an author living in a Western nation to
> write as though nothing had changed since the Middle Ages.

Read the article again. In it, Ann Druyan states that "The churches
agreed to stop torturing and murdering scientists.". And that´s
something. But I doubt that it´s enough.

>
> If planetariums were to set themselves up as temples of worship, any
> service they might have done in providing respect for science, or in
> inculcating critical thinking skills, in the benighted souls enmeshed in
> the toils of the more old-fashioned variants of Christianity still
> extant would come to an abrupt and total end.

I am not entirely sure about what you are trying to say here, but among
Saudi Arabian Moslems this might possibly apply.

Or perhaps not even there. Because it seems that you have misunderstood
what Ann Druyan means with "worship". And this is in fact
excusable, because she is using a very passionate language in this not
very systematic article. So let me help you here.

The term "worship" is meant here as nothing but a short formula for
any kind spiritual activity. And Ann Druyan considers "spiritual"
as "a word for that soaring feeling that we experience when we
contemplate 13 billion years of cosmic evolution and four and a half
billion years of the story of life on this planet". So what is it,
that makes the feeling that we experience when contemplating the
connectedness of cosmic and biological evolution so soaring?

This "soaringness" comes from the feeling of having retuned home.
Copernicus had thrown us out of our cosmic homstead in the center of
the universe where we lived as God´s very special children. And now
Evolutionary Theory, not only in the biological sense but in an all
encompassing sense including the chemical evolution of spiral galaxies
(or the succesively increasing abundance of heavy elements in their
interstellar matter - from which planets condense) teaches us that we
are a very integral part of the universe. We are incredibly small, but
we are by no means alien entities in this universe. This is what she
means with "finding our place in the fabric of nature". And whether
we are "insignificant" depends on how we define "significance".
For example, if we define as more significant what is more abundant,
then the most significant thing in the universe is dark energy - not
galaxies. But there is nothing which indicates that dark energy has the
same potential for auto-complexification as does baryonic matter.

In summary, just like the medieval christiano-ptolemaic cosmology as
described by Dante in his Divine Comedy could provide us with a sense
of home in the universe, so can evolution provide us with that sense of
home. The difference being that evolutionary theory is based on data
while religion is not. This is what she is trying to say with the term
"worship".

And how would such "worship" look in practice? For instance, it
could be looking at impressive films with a message. And producing such
films is what she actually is already doing with Cosmos Studios
(".....The Search for Life, Are We Alone?-something about the nature
of life. It's a very uncompromising message about evolution and I think
very directly promotes the kind of values and ideas that I think we
share......"). So in the end, all this worship business is much less
dramatic than it might sound for some people. She is just using a very
passionate language meant for people of whom she believes that she can
be sure they will basically understand her.

I do understand her, even though I do not coincide with her historical
viewpoint. I believe that it have not been "four centuries of
disconnect", but that this disconnection has basically happened
during the 20th century (at least the first half of which might well
deserve the title "silliest epoch in human history"). And that what
has happened was/is a humanistic and romantic rebellion against the
scientific spirit which usually is called "Postmodernism" - a term
which seems to be as unknown among the general population as its
premises are widely accepted today (Friedrich Nietzsche is considered
to be it´s earliest forebearer). But since Postmodernism is a rather
non-descriptive term and its meaning is in essence anti-modernist and
pro-irrationalist, I tend to reject that term and substitute it with
"Neoromanticism"(*). But that´s another long story.

>
> While scientific facts about human biology can help us see that Negro
> slavery was wrong, in general, science deals in facts rather than
> values.

I will not deny the utility of a clear distinction between empirics and
ethics, or between "what is" and "what ought to be", especially
when you have to live and orientate yourself in a society which is not
as you would like it to be. It has also happened that human values have
entered into or influenced scientific concepts, in which case these
concepts became non scientific concepts (Stephen J. Gould as an
example). We should not strive to adapt the world to human conception,
but vice versa.

Nevertheless, today it has become en vogue to go overboard with this
distinction between empirics and ethics. It is nonsense to claim that
human nature, as investigated by anthropologists, cannot or even should
not have any impact on the values we promote. For example, one should
be very careful about suppressing natural human impulses if one wants
to promote values which run headlong against human nature. We should
also be very careful about assuming that any old human being we run
into by chance is a rational being. I wonder if there is any
appropriate forum on the Usenet for a discussion of human nature
(talk.philosophy won´t be it, and neither sci.anthropology).

Equally, neuroscience could potentially have a great impact on the
question of up to where we have to be made responsible for our
"own" actions, i.e. on legislation.

So the distinction between empirics and ethics is partially justified
and partially artificial.

In this context it is interesting to note that the promoters of an
absolute distinction between empirics and ethics tend to claim that
someting like human nature doesn´t even exist, and that the human mind
thus is produced 100% by society (i.e. that we have "emancipated
ourselves of our evolutionary past" - I couldn´t think of a more
preposterous claim).

> It does not say much, clearly, about why it is wrong to lie,
> cheat, and steal - or rob, rape, and bully. (It can indeed tell us that
> it is inexpedient to do such things, if one might get caught, but most
> people already _knew_ that.) I do not doubt that someday Science will be
> able to address the problem of human consciousness, but that day still
> seems to be far in the future.

That day has already come. I recommend you to read "Mapping the
Mind" by Rita Carter (Orion Publishing Group 1998). It´s a book for
public education, but due to the tons of references it contains it´s
also a good synopsis of what we have found out so far and/or do assume
about in which areas of the brain what aspects of the mind are
produced, and how these areas interact. Of course: How exactly in terms
of neurocircuity these aspects of the mind are produced within the
various brain areas is only known very scetchily at best and normally
not at all. But you will nevertheless be amazed about how much we can
conclude from the data we have. The book is also very scetchy on
neuroanatomy, so you might want to have a good neuroanatomy atlas on
the side.

>
> Thus, there is much that science, as it is presently constituted, is not
> equipped to address, that religion does address

Ann Druyan seems use the term "science" in a very wide sense in her
article ("Science is a way of looking at absolutely everything"),
and unfortunately does not precisely define its meaning for people like
you (should I apologize for her?). I suppose she would accept a
definition like "sceptical inquisitiveness guided by relative
likelyhood and parsimony in conceptualization". Science for her is
more of an attitude than a specific method. A practical proposal of her
liking would be for example that in all educational systems all
schoolchildren from 6th or 7th grade on should be familiar with the
principle of Ockham´s Razor (see "parsimony in conceptualization"
above).

And depending on which language you operate in, the humanities are also
considered as sciences, even though normally they cannot base
themselves on countable data (the Germans for example distinguish
between "Humanwissenschaften" -sciences about humans- also called
"Geisteswissenschaften" -sciences of the mind- on one hand, and
"Naturwissenschaften" -natural sciences- on the other hand).

And besides that, there are other cognitive systems besides science
(-in the strict sense) and religion that are perfectly well equipped to
deal with philosophical issues. What one should recognize is that where
empirical scientific methods appear to be of little use (but who knows
about the future?), one must use reason instead of myths.

> - although, as religion
> is presently constituted, sometimes badly, and almost always at the
> price of demanding credulity in addition to faith.

You said it. So what then is the difference between pure faith and
credulity, please? If faith of the religious type (i.e. not in oneself)
is necessary to understand this, then your explanation will of
necessity become circular and you might as well forget about it.

>
> Attempts have been made to discuss such matters as right and wrong, that
> do not lend themselves to empirical investigation, outside of the
> context of purported Divine revelation. But this has been called
> Philosophy, not Science.

Religion is philosophy also. Or more precisely, it is theological
metaphysics. Theology is just one branch of metaphysics, the other two
classical branches of philosophy besides metaphysics being ethics and
epistemology. Ethics, thus, is not intrinsically related to theology
(or divine revelation). Think of utilitarian ethics, for example.

Furthermore, and as I have already mentioned above, Ann Druyan uses the
term "science" in a very wide sense in her article. This is not
advisable if you speak to a very critical audience, like the one on
this forum. But her article hasn´t been written for this forum.

> So far, with the exception of Confucius, no
> philosopher has quite amassed the following of a Jesus, or a Mohammed,
> or a Buddha... but the life of Gandhi has been too well documented to
> allow for the illusion that he rose from the dead, or performed
> miracles, and thus perhaps the next "Great Teacher" will be esteemed a
> philosopher rather than a prophet.

If Carl Sagan has been anything, he has been a truly great teacher. And
he has been a teacher with an attitude. The type of admiration which so
many people feel for him is exactly the type of admiration which you
feel for someone who has tought you something which has left a deep
impression in you.

>
> Understanding the universe indeed can be an inspiring human purpose; but
> before it can replace religion, it has to become something more than an
> elite hobby.

That it becomes more than an elite hobby, as Ann Druyan and others
(myself included) believe, should be the the ultimate purpose of the
planetarium. So planetariums should not only teach astronomy to the
general public, but they should also teach biology and evolution in
general and give people a feeling of belonging or being at home in the
universe.

And what better place to enlighten the general populace about church
indoctrination ("Intelligent Design" etc.) than a planetarium?
Especially in these days of increasing church indoctrination
("Indoctrination" simply means teaching garbage, and nothing more.
"Science Indoctrination" therefore is a misnomer, since it teaches
to think and not just to believe.) the promotion of new planetariums is
becoming ever more important. There should be at least as many
planetariums as there are churches, and they don´t all have to be
sophisticated. Especially in rural areas ("Red States"), where the
lack of scientific education seems to be the greatest, small
planetariums could serve as a mere introduction to learn to appreciate
the real thing. A good goal to shoot for would be that 85% of all
Americans should have a planetarium within 10 miles of driving
distance.

So forget about the organ and the songbooks, and put a good all
surround film projection. And then boggle them so they will never
forget what they have seen. And then send them home with the feeling
that they belong into the Milky Way.

> Although they would like a bit more respect and funding,
> and though commentators have worried about the spectre of a lab-coated
> priesthood, scientists fortunately generally harbor little in the way of
> *conscious* ambitions in that direction - for which we may be grateful.

It is a very unfortunate fact that -at least today- the majority of
scientists have so much fear of getting in contact with philosophy. In
fact, if a scientist is called a "philosopher" by his/her
colleagues, it is normally meant as a disqualification. In the 18th and
19th centuries, nevertheless, science was frequently called "natural
philosophy". This phenomenon has to be interpreted in the context of
the alienation process which has happened between the sciences and the
humanities (or: see German terminology above) beginning in the 19th,
but ocurring above all during the 20th century. Another highly
interesting topic to discuss.

Carl Sagan was just such a scientist-philosopher. And his philosophy
was not distinguished by its intricacy, but to the contrary by its
straightforwardness. He just showed the facts and then tried to teach
people sum up 1+1. So what we need are not only more planetariums, but
we also need more Carl Sagans to man them.

> In any case, until the economy turns around - perhaps because fusion
> power replaces cheap oil to return us to the growth of the 1948-1973
> period - scientists and engineers are not likely to be revered as the
> givers of plenty instead of merely the givers of cool trinkets.

I wonder why people always keep mixing up science and engineering.
Scientists try to find out what existst and how it works, while
engineers try to create new things which never existed before. In this
sense engineers have, even though to a lesser degree than arquitects,
something in common with artists. And only a very small percentage of
scientific findings in general are also useful for the engineer.
Somewhere I have read Ann Druyan calling technology a "Two-edged
by-product of science". And that´s what it is. A by-product but by
no means the essence of science.

>
> Eventually, some scientist is going to discover that the current growth
> of Fundamentalism is because the reproductive behavior of
> college-educated secular liberals happens to respond in a more elastic
> fashion to economic conditions than that of rural lower-middle-class
> Evangelicals and Fundamentalists.

I have the impression that rural Evangelicals and Fundamentalists
transgress income classes.

> (I have great faith in the ability of
> Science to eventually discover the obvious. Harry Harlow discovered that
> babies need the affection of their mothers to develop properly, and,
> just recently, it was found that bossy, manipulative teenage girls were
> more likely to have been drawn from the ranks of bossy, manipulative
> three-year olds.)

If science is limited to confirm the obvious, why then did it take so
much time to figure out where we live and where we come from? I suppose
that you have been anticipating the existence of dark energy long
before its effect was detected. So please illuminate us about what is
its nature.

>
> What will happen then? Perhaps, learning of his discovery, the great
> Illuminati-Freemason conspiracy will use its amazing powers to create an
> economic boom.

You do have humor. The above text could have been by Frank Zappa (e.g.
"Gregory Peckery").

> This seems at least as likely as human sacrifice at the
> winter solstice at one's local planetarium.

I am afraid that if things will keep going as they have started out
this century, this might ideed happen eventually.

> If one proposes to reshape
> society, perhaps one should study its workings scientifically, rather
> than clinging to pious hopes about human regeneration.

I don´t know what you mean by "pious hopes about human
regeneration", so I´ll just skip it. For the rest:

Sociologists consider themselves as scientists, even though not as
natural scientists.
As far as the connection between the social sciences and the natural
sciences is concerned, there have been some very crude -in the sense
of reductionist- early attempts to interpret human culture within its
biological context (late 19th and early 20th century). They were
reductionist in the sense of denying or simply ignoring emergent system
properties of human culture as for instance the desires for individual
liberty and/or communal justice. The result was that in the milder case
that such interpretations lead to the promotion of Social Darwinism and
in the worst case to the equation of race with culture (there are other
examples in the history of science where extreme reductionism lead to
absurd conclusions). Fortunately -and perhaps adequately- these
interpretations have been termed as "biologism" and not as
"evolutionism", so the latter term remained untainted by early
screwups. Whether sociobiology suffers fron exessive reductionism is a
matter of current debate, but at any rate it does not claim to offer an
all inclusive explanation for the phenomenon of human culture.

At any rate, it seems that these early failures still tend to make
scientists shy away from interpreting culturation as a prolongation of
phylogeny by other -more flexible- means. Biopolitics, i.e. the study
of how supposedly innate cognitive propensities of humans influence
their political behaviour is still in its beginnings. As a good attempt
to demonstrate the continuity between phylogeny and culturation I
consider the book "The Evolution of Culture in Animals" by John
Tyler Bonner (Princeton University Press 1980, don´t know if there
were later editions). One aspect of the evolution of culture appears to
be that it is correlated with an evolution of communication systems.

In this context I would also like to call into memory one of Carl
Sagan´s books: "The Dragons of Eden". I think that it might be
perhaps his weakest book, but it contains one jewel of a slogan:
"From genes to brains to books", referring itself to the evolution
of information storage systems. Unfortunately, Carl Sagan does not
elaborate the detailed history of that evolutionary process in that
book, which in my opinion represents a more or less loose connection of
various ideas of him. And as far as I know, such a detailed analysis is
still wanting, even though it would likely be a perfect complementation
to the ideas of Bonner.

So there remains a lot of work to be done in this field, and any
proposal about how to reshape society according to scientific criteria
today would have to stand on the clay feet of mere speculation. And I
will not venture into such speculations at this spot, as tempting as it
is (I am sure that it must have something to do with communication, and
perhaps even with the Internet).

At any rate, the above sentence of yours is the only one in your
article where I could imagine a possible coincidence in opinions
between us.

>
> Or someone could just write the President a letter, explaining that
> thorium breeder reactors are possible. Something like that worked once
> before.

Nobody doubts our technological ability to build thorium breeders. But
that´s not a subject for this forum.

Peter Holm




(*: As distinguished from similarly named movements in the arts and
literature)

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